Category Archives: child soldiers

Haitian gangs recruiting starving children to fight security forces, rights group finds

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Hundreds of poor and desperate children targeted in anticipation of long and bloody battle, says Human Rights Watch

Haitian armed gangs are recruiting starving children to swell their ranks ahead of an anticipated long and bloody battle with international security forces, a report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) has found.

Armed groups – which control most of Haiti – are enticing hundreds, if not thousands, of impoverished children to take up arms with offers of food and shelter, the rights groups said.

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Liberia senate votes to establish war crimes court

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The court will investigate crimes against humanity committed during the African country’s two civil wars between 1989 and 2003

Senators in Liberia have voted overwhelmingly to establish a war crimes court, two decades after civil conflict ended in the west African country.

The new court will investigate and try crimes against humanity and corruption committed during Liberia’s two civil wars between 1989 and 2003, which killed up to 250,000 people.

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The battle for Mekelle: Ethiopia’s civil war over Tigray goes on – in pictures

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An estimated 2.2 million people have been forced from their homes and thousands have been killed in the civil war that broke out in Ethiopia last November when government troops entered Mekelle, capital of the Tigray region. Witnessed by photographer Sergio Ramazzotti, the city was retaken by the Tigray Defence Forces in June, but peace in the region seems a long way off

  • All photographs by Sergio Ramazzotti/Parallelozero

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‘Collective strength’: the LRA captive restoring dignity to survivors in Uganda

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Kidnapped by Lord’s Resistance Army rebels as a girl, Victoria Nyanjura has pushed through major reforms for victims of abduction and rape

When Victoria Nyanjura was abducted from her Catholic boarding school in northern Uganda by members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, she prayed to God asking to die.

She was 14 when she was taken, along with 29 others, in the middle of the night. During the next eight years in captivity she was subjected to beatings, starvation, rape and other horrors that she cannot talk about even 18 years later. Five of the girls who were taken prisoner with her died, and Nyanjura gave birth to two children.

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‘I had to kill so many people’: the battle to protect children in conflicts

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25,000 grave violations were committed against children in conflict in 2019, says the UN, which hopes to highlight issue with new international day

When Islamic State fighters rolled into Mosul, Iraq, they made promises.

“When they arrived they promised us salvation, a better life, but within months our schools were closed and we were living in fear, prisoners in our own city,” says Usama Salem, 11.

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Rise in children forced to join militias raises fresh fears over South Sudan

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Growing number of young fighters combined with sexual violence and ethnic tensions threatens return to civil war, UN warns

UN investigators have warned that despite the fragile peace in South Sudan, the recruitment of children into the army and militias is on the increase as each side seeks to bolster infantry numbers.

The investigators also warned that sexual violence against women and localised ethnic violence are increasing tensions that could return the country to civil war.

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‘Before I was kidnapped I had friends’: the girl soldiers of South Sudan | Samuel Okiror

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A reintegration programme has helped 360 girls leave armed groups in Yambio county but for many the trauma of sexual violence persists

Late one night in April 2015, 13-year-old Patricia* and her sister, who was 11, were kidnapped from their beds by rebel forces fighting the government in South Sudan.

The girls were taken from their home in a raid on their village by the South Sudan National Liberation Movement in Yambio county, not far from the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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South Sudan’s war: a relentless litany of almost unimaginable horrors

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A report laying bare the abominations associated with conflict in the world’s youngest state will shock the most hardened observer

There are wars that seem to slip under the wire almost unnoticed – where human rights abuses are rife and you would expect them to command far greater global attention.

Last week’s UN report into South Sudan is a case in point. An almost endless litany of human rights abuses, its 200-plus pages make for the most dismal reading, a portrait of the world’s youngest state as one of the latest additions to the category of failed state.

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